23 September 2011

faster than light?

I can't resist a another little science tidbit. The scientific world has been in an uproar lately because it appears a European experiment called OPERA has measured a neutrino travelling faster than the speed of light (186,282 miles per second)! The OPERA experiment observes a neutrino beam shot through the earth from CERN to Italy’s INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory 730 km away. See, for example, CERN's press release.

If true, this would be huge. HUGE. HUGE. Why, you ask? It was none other than Albert Einstein who hypothesized the speed of light is the fastest any particle can go. Since then (1905) numerous experiments have seemed to support Einstein. If Einstein's wrong some of the more speculative consequences include traveling to the stars, time travel, and the end of causality. See what I mean? HUGE.

I suspect, however, OPERA will be proved wrong.

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2 comments:

SteventheThorn said...

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. That would be awesome if the speed of light could be exceeded. We could compete with the warp engines...

3:38 PM
Martin Willoughby said...

I'd love it to be true just to give some ammo against the killjoys who laugh at ST's warp drive.

One theory is that the particles shifted into one of the smaller dimensions of the univers and bypassed our 4D world.

10:27 AM

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